[unable to retrieve full-text content]China has provided household registration permits to nearly 14 million unregistered citizens over the past four years.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]China’s Minister of Public Security Guo Shengkun on Thursday called for strengthened efforts against narcotics.

China’s cabinet, the State Council, has approved a plan for nuclear power safety and radioactive pollution control.

By the end of 2020, China aims to have 58 million kilowatts of nuclear power capacity in operation and more than 30 million kilowatts under construction.

China currently operates 36 nuclear reactors, and is building 20 new ones, world’s largest number of reactors under construction, according to an official with the Ministry of Environmental Protection.

The safety of the country’s nuclear facilities should be markedly enhanced by 2020, with lower occurrence rate of radiation accidents and better capabilities in emergency response and safety supervision, according to the plan.

By 2025, China should have modernized its supervision system and capacity on nuclear safety and radioactive pollution control, the plan said.

The plan also pledged to improve China’s radioactive waste disposal capacity to match the development of its nuclear industry.

Despite a downward trend of tuberculosis cases in recent years, China reports roughly 900,000 new cases annually, keeping it among the 30 countries with the highest incidence of the infectious disease, according to the National Health and Family Planning Commission.

By the end of 2016, the TB incidence rate stood at 61 per 100,000 people in China, down 14 percent since 2011, the latest statistics from the commission’s disease prevention and control bureau showed. The commission is the nation’s top health authority.

The bacterial infection was not evenly distributed across the country. Rural areas in the western regions recorded the highest TB prevalence, according to an e-mail from the commission on the eve of World TB Day on Thursday.

The Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region reported the highest TB prevalence, at 184.5 people out of 100,000 in 2015, and the Tibet autonomous region and Guizhou province followed.

The commission has taken in the past several years a number of steps alleviating the TB burden in these areas, including increasing investment for health projects, improving training for local medical staff and encouraging local governments to issue favorable policies for TB patients, such as increasing medical insurance reimbursement for the disease, the commission said.

Health authorities will continue to support areas with higher reported cases of TB, it said.

China also plans to intensify research in the prevention and control of TB in the next few years, the commission said.

A focus will be on research in preventive and curable vaccines for the disease, it said. Authorities also will encourage research into new therapies and drugs for TB, including chemotherapies and immunotherapies, it said.

On Thursday, China’s first lady Peng Liyuan visited a middle school in Tianjin to promote TB prevention and treatment awareness among students.

Peng, a World Health Organization goodwill ambassador for tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, attended a class meeting with the theme of fighting TB and visited an exhibition of creative works made by students to promote prevention.

Incidence of tuberculosis in China is expected to be reduced to below 58 for every 100,000 people by 2020, according to a national plan on the control and prevention of TB released by the State Council in February.

According to the document, services for preventing and treating tuberculosis should be further improved by 2020 and those who have the disease should be diagnose dearly and given access to regular treatment.

“China faces many challenges in the prevention and control of tuberculosis, in particular the big number of patients and the number of patients that have developed drug resistance,” said Wang Xiexiu, former president of the Chinese Antituberculosis Association.

There are few new drugs for TB, and those commonly used have lost their effect in many patients due to drug resistance, she said. The WHO estimated that in 2015 China had 57,000 cases of multidrug resistant TB.

More overseas scholars now seek to come to China to study Tibetan history and culture, a senior researcher said on Thursday.

These people have received higher education in their home countries, but lack on-site studies in the Tibet autonomous region and traditional Tibetology research, said Zheng Dui, secretary-general of the China Tibetology Research Center, China’s top academic research institute on the topic.

At a news conference, Zheng made the remarks in response to questions from overseas reporters on whether monasteries and schools built by the Dalai Lama’s followers in India would attract more Tibetan people from China to accept education there.

“I’m not worried at all, because the roots of traditional Tibetan culture is in China,” he said.

Zheng said there are 6 million Tibetan people in China, comprising the vast majority of the ethnic group around the world, so “the mainstream of Tibetology is thus right here”.

The center estimates about 150,000 Tibetan people live in South Asia.

“On the contrary, we’ve noticed that more Tibetan scholars living overseas now begin to seek opportunities studying Tibetan history and culture back in China,” Zheng said.

“It’s not a question how the mainstream adapts to tributaries, but how tributaries get merged into the mainstream.”

Nevertheless, Zheng said more communication between Tibetology institutes in China and their overseas counterparts is crucial to develop more fruitful academic results and train experts in other countries.

For instance, starting from joint efforts with Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2004 on studies of ancient Tibetan Buddhism manuscripts in Sanskrit, cooperation with Zheng’s institute has expanded to more countries’ including the United States, Italy and Japan.

Founded in 1986, China Tibetology Research Center has nearly 200 scholars covering history, economy, traditional medicine and many more fields. There are more than 50 research institutes focused on Tibetology in China.

Zheng said some large-scale Tibetological projects can only be done by China. For example, the editing of The General History of Tibet, which includes 9 million characters in eight volumes, was completed in 2015 after 18 years of work, which he said clarified some misleading theories on Tibet’s history.

And, the ongoing editing of the Tibetan language volume of Zhonghua Dadian (Chinese Encyclopedia) is estimated to include more than 1,000 types of ancient books in Tibetan. The estimated 15-year project began in 2013.